Not a stand alone piece in any way…

Not a stand alone piece in any way…

The next installment of Season of the Witch, “Daughter of Detroit” is out for edits right now. I’m pretty excited about it. I really enjoy Clarissa as a character. I feel like her out-of-time disconnect really speaks to me. Like many of the Season of the Witch characters, Clarissa has a hard time connecting with the world around her, but unlike many of those other characters, Clarissa desperately wants to. She wants to be part of the world and finds herself ill-equipped to do so. (A lot like someone else I know. *whistles innocently* but that’s another blog post for another day.)

What I’m pondering today before I dive into edits and try to make my self imposed deadline, is one observation my boyfriend made: “Well, it’s not a stand alone piece in any way.”

Which is completely true. It’s not a stand alone piece. It hasn’t been for awhile.

Season of the Witch has been slowly moving away from being stand alones since I decided to write a sequel to Jaclyn of the Lantern. Even Jaclyn, though, benefits greatly from the added knowledge acquired by reading on. Since Red, when the series diverged from the originally planned six novellas to a much more extended set of episodes, I have known quite well that the stories in the series are all part of a greater mythology, a larger artistic work that hopefully, one day, will be collected into a single tome (Hence the Patreon, which hints at this goal. I would love to make said collection an illustrated and unique work of art, but that’s way down the road). The fact that the pieces are not stand alone is not a failing, but it makes me wonder though if I need to rethink my release structure. I mean, it is a -huge- experiment after all. Sometimes, I think I’m flailing around in the dark with this self publishing thing.

As things currently stand, I put out an installment once every few months by publishing it on Smashwords. I do this so that I can get the largest amount of formats for the smallest investment. By using this method, it creates a separate “book” for each installment, which I don’t necessarily mind. I started doing this with Jaclyn because at that time the plan was six stand alone novellas, but I’ve kept it up because as of right now I’m not aware of a more effective method, and besides, in my mind, it adds something to the endeavor. I jokingly call Season of the Witch my “comic book project” for this reason. But is this really best? Or is it just confusing to people who come to the project expecting full length stories, only to find something a lot more episodic than what they were after? Is there a release structure that would be more indicative of what the series truly is?